Afromodernisms

Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde

Makes a persuasive case for a black Atlantic literary renaissance & its impact on modernist studies

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These 10 new chapters stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two key ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating 'blackness' as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. This is the first book-length publication to explore the term 'Afromodernisms' and the first study to address together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.

Key Features

Sets a new agenda for the study of blackness and modernism

Specially commissioned contribution from Tyler Stovall on Black Modernism and an Afterword from Demetrius Eudell on 'What to the Negro is Modernism?'

Identifies key locations of modernism: Harlem, Paris, Haiti

Addresses the question of gender, often overlooked in black Atlantic scholarship

About the Author

Fionnghuala Sweeney is a Lecturer in the School of English, Drama & Film at University College Dublin. She is the author of Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (University of Liverpool Press, 2007) and co-editor, with D Dolowitz and S Buckler, of Researching Online (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Kate Marsh is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of India in the French Imagination: Peripheral Voices, 1754-1815 (Pickering & Chatto, 2009) and Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian Decolonization, 1919-1962 (Peter Lang, 2007); and the co-editor, with N Frith, of France's Lost Empires: Fragmentation, Loss and la fracture coloniale (Lanham, 2010).

Reviews

'Convincingly demonstrates the ways in which the period under consideration helped "define the aesthetics and politics of the twentieth century, and through this [the collection] links the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic"'- Dominic Thomas, University of California, Los Angeles, French Studies